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PS4 Review: Everything

How does one explain Everything? Well you begin as an amoeba and quickly progress into a snow leopard and it’s here where things start to progressively become insane. First of all everything in the game can be played and they each have a calling. For a Snow Leopard or any other type of animal that’s fitting, but when it comes to houses and rocks well then we’re getting into crazy town.

Communicating doesn’t do much, but sometimes objects in the game will have white, or rainbow bubbles above them. The white clouds range from advice to nonsensical observations. The rainbow messages are audio logs taken from the philosopher Alan Watts in a series of talks he gave throughout his life in the 60s and 70s. Who are we? What is a thing? How does one define living? Notions like this are interesting to ponder, but when you’re a frog flying through space it seems misplaced. Still this isn’t a game about him so that’s just a minor bump.

Getting back to gameplay you can also group up with other animals, or objects. Again, going back to the snow leopard, you can run around in packs. Later on you can actually group with categories and not just of your same species. So bears could join the snow leopard along with llamas, goats, and so forth. It’s funnier to watch a horde of houses travel through the great wilds though and that’s pretty much what Everything is trying to communicate. It’s a game without much for goals and is more about creating your own experiences and enjoyment from your bizarre tinkering.

Perhaps the easiest way to categorize Everything is to liken it to Goat Simulator and No Man’s Sky. Goat Simulator really has no point to it either and as for No Man’s Sky, well I feel the procedural generated areas and exploring of species is better in this game. True there’s more of a sense of progression in No Man’s Sky, technically, but a lot of those mechanics get in the way of exploring. My mission was an endless loop of going into space, finding a new planet, delving onto the surface, looking for plants and animals and then repeating that process in the hopes of discovering something wackier than the last excavation. That was my desire in play at least.

While I did enjoy my time with Everything it was fleeting. You can pretty much see the game’s mechanics presented to you in the first couple hours. It’s fun to mess around with and perhaps accompanied by friends it can be a blast for an obscure party game, but admittedly it’s not for everybody. That said it’s hard to score. On one hand there’s not much to it, but at a maximum cost of $15 I don’t think the money is an issue. It’s like buying a ticket to a bizarre indie movie where anything is playable to the specs of an atom to the vastness of the sun. There is value in Everything, but you have to know what you’re getting yourself into and I hope I at least did a moderate job of conveying that. Sometimes it takes more than words so be thankful for video reviews.